Film Review: BEAST (2022): Idris Elba Stars in an Intense but Emotionally Lacking Thrill Ride

Beast Review

Beast (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Baltasar Kormakur, written by Ryan Engle and Jaime Primak Sullivan and starring Idris Elba, Sharlto Copley, Iyana Halley, Leah Jeffries, Chris Langa, Thapelo Sebogodi and Martin Munro.

Idris Elba is an incredible movie star but his latest action picture, Beast, is bare bones in terms of both plot and character development. Elba portrays Dr. Nate Samuels, a man whose ex-wife has died of cancer. Nate takes his two daughters, Norah (Leah Jeffries) and Meredith (Iyana Halley) into the jungle to bond and all hell breaks loose as a rogue lion threatens their lives. It becomes a fierce, intense battle of man vs. beast as Nate must fight for his survival and protect his family from the vicious nature of the violent lion referred to in the movie’s title.

We meet the young girls’ uncle Martin (Sharlto Copley) who sets the movie’s plot into motion as he gets his knee severely injured and must struggle to stay alive. In the beginning, Martin introduces Nate and the girls to a family of lions but one of the female lions is injured and doesn’t respond so well to the group’s attempts at innocuous contact. This is a foreshadowing device the film uses to hint that things will take a turn for the worse as the story line develops.

The film establishes the cast of characters the best it can but falters a bit. Meredith is an artist who wants to go to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is initially developed as an interesting character but Norah, the younger daughter, remains a thinly written character. Since Nate hasn’t been paying as much attention to his daughters as he should be, the occurrences that transpire over the film will bring them together, but under circumstances they may have wished would have never happened.

Nate discovers a group of human victims who have been killed by the predatory lion. Just as he tries to protect his daughters by keeping them safe in the vehicle they are driving in, the rogue lion constantly attacks and there is no turning back for the family. They must fight against all odds for survival. It becomes an intense fight to the finish for the family.

There are a number of remarkably orchestrated action scenes. One comes pretty early in the movie where Nate is fighting for his life against the lion under the family’s vehicle. However, too many scenes rely on the characters taking risks by exiting the vehicle that don’t ring true. Of course, one of the girls wants to help save Uncle Martin but I didn’t buy for a minute that she’d put her life in jeopardy with the vicious beast at large in the film by getting out of the vehicle and going wandering.

That being said, Elba has tremendous appeal as an action hero and the scenes against the lion are done in such a way that Elba keeps his character heroic enough that we root for him throughout. Even though Nate is a very underdeveloped character, Elba makes him relatable but the movie itself also lacks depth. Nate is a man who suffered the loss of his ex-wife but that’s it. He doesn’t get much more developed as a character. The movie could have benefitted from more emotional plot enrichment. We could have learned more about Nate and his family, perhaps even in more conversations between confrontations with the lion. A movie like Beast needs to keep us emotionally invested in the characters to work and the film comes up a bit short in fleshing out the characters.

Director Baltasar Kormakur can stage excellent action sequences but needs to up the stakes by humanizing his characters more. At some times throughout the film, Kormakur oddly gets us to sympathize a little bit with the lions. I think the movie should have focused on making us care more about the family as a whole than even creating a bit of sympathy for the animals. Similar films like Jaws and Cujo developed their characters more and were successful as a result due to this fact.

Beast also clocks in a little short with a running time under 90 minutes (without credits) but has some clever touches that make it rise to the occasion. When one of the daughters has a Jurassic Park shirt on in the beginning stages of the film, it’s brilliant, but the movie fails to live up to any of the Jurassic Park films as a creature feature. Elba has been doing a lot of projects lately and this is one of his lesser movies though the action is intense enough to check the movie out if you like suspenseful scares and ferocious scenes of intensity which Beast does, indeed, provide.

Rating: 6/10

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